I think my philosophy starts with treating others as you want to be treated yourself and then looking for opportunities to help people realise their potential, whether that be within work or outside of work.
If you can support people to achieve their goals, then you’re adding value to those people.
It’s my job to support the people in the business that are interacting with our candidates and our clients and providing valuable Business Services.
They are the front line, creating a great recruitment experience for our candidates and clients. And it’s my job as the CEO of the business to make sure they’re supported to be able to do their job to the best of their ability.
Yeah, I think it did.
When I was growing up, I was always somebody who was organising things, or arranging the football team, or captaining the class team on sports day.
I remember a teacher turning around to me when I was younger and saying; ‘you’re a born leader.’ I didn’t really understand or recognise that myself at the time but obviously, he did recognise that.
In my first recruitment role, I was asked to manage someone within nine months of starting. I didn’t know a huge amount about recruitment myself at that time. But again, someone must have recognised that I had the ability to lead others.
I’m definitely comfortable making decisions, but prefer to work in a collaborative environment. So if you can make a decision, having got the opinions of people around you who potentially have more knowledge in that area, then you’re likely to make the right decision.
So leadership isn’t making all calls purely based on your own experience. It’s talking to, understanding and gathering expertise from the people in your business and around you to make the best possible decision.
When I started in recruitment, we used to advertise for candidates in the back of physical magazines like Computer Weekly. Your adverts were often written 10 days before it went to press. CVs came through the post or through the fax machine.
Digitization as fundamentally changed the industry.
I think that it allowed people to interact with clients en masse. Email allows increased levels of interaction with clients, but also perhaps reduce the quality of the service provided, because rather than actually speaking to people, or meeting people face to face, there was now the opportunity to communicate electronically, and to a certain degree, dehumanised the industry.
But the real positive thing is, technology is now playing a huge part in enabling us to provide a better experience. So with the mass adoption of video conferencing tools due to the Coronavirus, we’ve now got an opportunity to build really good relationships with our candidates and our clients without necessarily, you know, increasing the carbon footprint by, you know, travelling two or three hours to go and see them. So I think it’s nice to see technologies really come full circle.
I think that when you read books or listen to podcasts from any successful person, the thing that underpins their success is hard work.
And I think whether it’s sportspeople, business people or politicians, you, you always see that people work incredibly hard to get to the top and to be successful. So I think you should be prepared to put in the hard yards, but equally, I think you’ve also got to work smart. And I think you have to be open to innovation, you have to be able to create and come up with new ideas yourself, but also be humble enough to adopt ideas that other people have come up with. Because I think if you work in collaboration with other people, you will always get get get a better result.
So I think it’s that combination of working hard but also working smart. Because you can also be a busy fool.
I think, to start with, it’s having to wear multiple hats, when you are running a small business, you have to perform every role within that business. And that means there’s generally not enough hours in the day. And then, as your business grows, it’s making sure that you recruit really good people, to head the various functions of the business, who were then more than capable of taking those functions forward and doing a better job than you could possibly have done trying to wear every hat.
So I think one of the challenges is making sure that you hire very good people, and then trusting them and delegating areas and functions of the business to them and letting them get on with it. But then being there to support them to achieve the goals of the business.
I think that if you start your own business, it’s because you’ve got a real passion for what you do. And I think that recruitment done well can fundamentally change people’s lives for the better.
Moving jobs, be it on a permanent or a contract basis is one of the biggest decisions you’re going to make in your life and if you do that well, then you make a really positive, lasting impression on that person.
With Evolution, our goal was really to provide a better standard of recruitment a better experience for candidates and clients than they generally experience in the industry.
Evolution is home because I’m surrounded by like-minded people who are trying to help others realise their potential, and they’re trying to do that on a day to day basis by providing a great recruitment experience.
